Losing Identity Quotes

Sometimes by holding onto what you love the most - you end up choking the very life from the thing you want to keep on living. It's possible to try too hard, to love something so deeply that you lose yourself. The danger is never in loving someone - but losing your identity in the process. Because what happens when tragedy strikes? You're left an empty shell. You're left with nothing. ~ Rachel Van Dyken

I'm a woman; in so many ways I've been programmed to please. I took the job and spent time hunkered over figures, budgets, charts, and fiscal-year projections. I tried, but I hated it.
"Working at a job you don't like is the same as going to prison every day," my father used to say. He was right. I felt imprisoned by an impressive title, travel, perks, and a good salary. On the inside, I was miserable and lonely, and I felt as if I was losing myself. I spent weekends working on reports no one read, and I gave presentations that I didn't care about. It made me feel like a sellout and, worse, a fraud.
Now set free, like any inmate I had to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. ~ Kathleen Flinn

Increasingly, I'm coming to believe that fear is at the heart of all sin and disaffection. Fear that God will not be enough for us; fear that the identity we've been given is somehow incomplete. ~ Jonathan Martin

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are. ~ Rebecca Solnit

I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate. ~ Charlotte Bronte

There's a new line of research showing that people who don't get enough sleep, they're body doesn't metabolize as well. And so they actually - it leads to weight gain. So if you're not getting enough sleep, you might have difficulty losing weight. ~ Shelby Harris

Choice is the mortar that binds together the things that make us who we are. ~ Fennel Hudson

Perpetuating success or sliding into decline is the result of many intersecting forces that reinforce one another directly and indirectly. They are both cause and effect of winning or losing. Winning generates positive forces, losing generates negative forces. ~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter

I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Once you start losing reality, when you start losing reality with yourself, sometimes people just get dizzy. ~ DJ Khaled

People who've Been to Hell and Back develop a certain sort of self-righteousness. There is a tendency to say: I have an addictive personality, I am terribly sensitive, I'm touched with fire, I have Scars. There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself and did not wait for salvation, you'd be self-sufficient. How dull. ~ Marya Hornbacher

Someone, someday will ask who I was. And someone, someday will answer by saying, "Well, look at what he did". And what I hope I 'did' was to leave behind a really good answer. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If you love someone your freedom is curtailed, if you love someone you give up much of your privacy, if you love someone you are not merely one person but half of a couple, to think or behave any other way is to risk losing that love. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

I think all writers are armchair psychologists to some degree or another, and I think a character's sexuality is fascinating. It's a great way to really get at the root of their identity, because it's such a personal thing. ~ Alan Ball

A promise is a gift and a gift is a symbol of a social relationship. The donor is aware that it creates a link and the recipient identifies it as a mutual bond. A gift, however, is tangible and a promise is not. Eventually, a promise can be expounded as misunderstood, or misheard or it is simply over and done. If misheard, the social bond is to be put into question. If forgotten, it can be reminded but this is embarrassing. If elapsed, it is one of those broken promises that infest countless relationships. ( "Promised me a breeze of freedom" ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror. ~ Amartya Sen

His grief at your leaving is also his fear of losing the power he has had for lifetimes. Those days are over for him, and he is in turmoil. But if you are to help him on his soul's quest, you will leave him. It is your job
your sacred contract
to free him, and to free yourself. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

From that mild dissociation, I quickly went into a deeper dissociative state if there was conflict around me, if someone expressed strong emotions, or if something unpredictable happened. Although these difficult situations triggered me, they brought out behavior that helped me do well when the going got tough. I loved solving problems and getting into the thick of things and also had well-developed skills in reading people and anticipating their needs. ~ Olga Trujillo

Please choose the way of peace.. In the short term there may be winners and losers in this war that we all dread. But that never can, nor never will justify the suffering, pain and loss of life your weapons will cause. ~ Mother Teresa

Islam is simple, but being a Muslim in a modern world is not. Everyday is a battle that each of us have to face. It is easy to get swept away and lose one's identity. The constant struggle is to find out who we are and how to remain steadfast. ~ Norhafsah Hamid

While we cannot live without history, we need not live within it either. ~ Amartya Sen

I don't know where this pressure came from. I can't blame my parents because it has always felt internal. Like any other parent, my mother celebrated the A grades and the less-than-A grades she felt there was no need to tell anybody about. But not acknowledging the effort that ended in a less than perfect result impacted me as a child. If I didn't win, then we wouldn't tell anyone that I had even competed to save us the embarrassment of acknowledging that someone else was better. Keeping the secret made me think that losing was something to be ashamed of, and that unless I was sure I was going to be the champion there was no point in trying. And there was certainly no point to just having fun. ~ Portia De Rossi

When you've lost, it's better to brace for landing than to grasp at strands of air, hoping for a parachute that isn't coming. Not enough people know how to lose. ~ Ian Thomas Malone

Corvina must have been so different then ... really literally a different person. At what point do you make that call? At what point should you just give someone a new name? Sorry, no, you don't get to be Corvina anymore. Now you're Corvina 2.0 - a dubious upgrade. ~ Robin Sloan

People still were emotionally connected to the vale by seeing a value in their local cultural life. They were still seriously political and tried to find their identity by inheriting memories from the experiences of each other. For Kashmiris, the struggle to remember never ended. ~ Naveed Qazi

If you're crazy enough to put your hat into the ring of speculation and punditry, you're going to get some turbulence. But if it's coming from some journalist with a comfortable degree of body fat, I'm not losing any sleep over it. ~ Henry Rollins

AAH!~ Fuck, I admit it! I want to protect her! I don't want to lose her!! I don't even want to think about the possibility of losing her!! I will face anything in order to protect this dream of mine!!!! ~ Accelerator

Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity. ~ Marcus Sakey

[ ... ] My wild words slip into fusion and risk losing the solid ground. So stranger, get wilder still. Probe the highlands. ~ Jim Morrison

But it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess - that there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be: and to study or influence these means, no less than the primary insult to the nervous system, is an essential part of our role as physicians. ~ Oliver Sacks

I'm learning quickly, once you quit one thing, it gets easier and easier just to leave situations rather than deal with shit. ~ Doug Cooper

What people love about life is its miraculous beauty; what they hate about death is the loss and decay around it. Yet losing is not losing, and decay turns into beauty, as beauty turns back into decay. We are breathed in, breathed out. Therefore all you need is to understand the one breath that makes up the world. ~ Stephen Mitchell

The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia. ~ Walker Percy

What thou art, that thou art; that God knoweth thee to be and thou canst be said to be no greater. ~ Thomas A Kempis

Practically everyone now bemoans Western man's sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organizing society for human ends. We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity-advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary. ~ Jean Baker Miller

When you've lost a baby, everyone around you expects you to be fine once the new baby is born, as though that somehow takes away the pain of losing the first child. I needed to express how wrong that was. ~ Elizabeth McCracken

I'm so sorry, Brody. I won't bullshit you and feed you a line about how it will get easier, because I know it won't. You don't get over losing someone you love. You just learn to live through the pain every day as you try to have some kind of normalcy in your life. ~ Danielle Jamie